Lemony snippets
The Hindu
Food tastes delicious when it’s served with lashings of history and humour
It’s a simple dish, but never fails to lift my spirits. Called rasewalley aloo — or potatoes in tomato gravy — it just needs a few basic spices, and an appetite, to hit the right spot. I never gave its two main ingredients much thought though and was greatly impressed when I read recently that the tomato had been to court, and the spud was once considered evil.
In 1893, 300 years after tomatoes were first cultivated in Europe, the U.S. Supreme Court had to decide whether tomatoes were a fruit or a vegetable. A 10% tax had just been imposed on imported vegetables to protect American farmers. In 1887, a tomato importer moved court, arguing that tomatoes were fruits and therefore exempt from the rule — and he wanted his money back.
The case went to the Supreme Court, and the judges ruled it was indeed a vegetable, because, “like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, [it is] usually served at dinner... and not, like fruits generally, as dessert,” writes Matt Siegel in The Secret History of Food: Strange But True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat. Before that, for years tomatoes were thought to be poisonous and believed to be used in “witches’ brew” and to summon werewolves.
Plague and lemonade
Potatoes went through a rough patch, too.
“In addition to their associations with witchcraft and devil worship, they were once thought to cause syphilis and leprosy, largely because of the way they looked...” Many believed that eating potatoes at night “caused mothers to bear children with abnormally large heads or that pinning someone’s name to a potato cursed them to certain death.”
Siegel’s book, along with Tom Nealon’s Food Fights & Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste, has given me much to chew on. Nealon tells us that the words ‘buccaneer’ and ‘barbecue’ emerge from the same source — the Caribbean Taíno tribe word barbacòa, a framework of wooden sticks used to dry or slowcook meat.